#ecology

I’ve seen this graphic from this blog going around, and while I agree that it is pretty and visually interesting, I find it mostly ineffective for communicating the magnitudes of pandemics over time. Our eyes and brains have a difficult time comparing the volume of spheres compared to a line on a bar chart. Additionally, the image is three dimensional in perspective, which further obfuscates direct comparisons. Pandemics So since I’m in quarantine, I decided to make a more basic image that allows one to compare magnitudes better. [Read More]

Sometimes in environmental regulation, we are unable to find a clear cause-effect relationship between a known stressor and a known response due to confounders. This is a common problem when attempting to determine acceptable nutrient regimes for some systems. For example, Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) was required to promulgate Numeric Nutrient Criteria for estuaries as the result of a lawsuit, yet no straightforward cause-effect relationship could be found for Total Nitrogen (TN) and/or Total Phosphorus (TP) leading to excess Chlorophyll a, which in turn lead to submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) die-off resulting in the loss of this key habitat for these highly productive systems. [Read More]

Happy 2018! I’ve rebuilt the website with the Beautiful-Hugo theme. It’s a new year, and one of my goals is to actually blog more consistently. With that in mind, here is a “better late than never” (but still later than it should be) post in which I look back and reflect on the past year. Borrowing a format I saw on The Lab and Field Blog, here is my 2017 by the numbers: [Read More]